1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an automatic system for phasing advancing articles having a planar supporting base, the separation step being eventually carried out by the system itself, and to a method of phasing the articles with this system.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Conventional singler devices receive adjacent articles at their inlet and output separated articles; these articles are usually sequenced, but they are time-spaced unevenly each from the other.
A singler device is disclosed in the Italian patent n. 01255541 (corresponding to U.S. Pat. No. 5,399,063) to the Applicant.
In automatic equipment for handling articles or goods, very often it is necessary to sequence, according to a predetermined cadence, trains of articles outputted randomly by an upstream machine or system. This need arises from the fact that it is possible to remarkably increase the throughput of the downstream handling system by optimizing the sequences of the trains so as to space apart two consecutive articles by distances corresponding to the optimal distances required by the downstream machines.
Sometimes a constant delay between the articles may be necessary to be able to carry out subsequent operations on the articles (packing, labelling, bar-code reading and the like).
At present, solutions are known that carry out phasing operations on the articles with synchronous loading system, suitable for articles the same as each other and of pre-established dimensions, usually not easily switchable over phasing of articles having dimensions the same as each other but different from the pre-established ones.
One of these solution is disclosed by WO 93/15005 where incoming articles are synchronously engaged by pawls mounted on the feeder belt. In this embodiment the optical sensor senses "groups of items" as units to be checked. Solutions allowing the automatic phasing of articles having diffrent dimensions are not known; usually an operator carries out such operation manually.